I know that I’m supposed to do it. I really do. But, like probably everyone else who is honest, I don’t always take notes as I research. That wastes time later. While at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, I worked on the extended family of a woman named Mary Parker who was […]

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then the Family Tree Historical Atlas of Germany by James Beidler is worth approximately 120,000. The book contains approximately 120 historical maps of Germany and environs (particularly to the east of present-day Germany) showing political boundaries, changes in those boundaries, concentrations of various religious denominations, and a few […]

Compiled military service records should be a lead in to other records and sources–they should not be an end in and of themselves. That’s particularly true with Illinois resident George Trautvetter who served in the 15th Missouri Infantry in the Civil War. The cover sheet for his compiled military service record indicated a book mark […]

Online searches go better when they are organized. Organized searches increase the chance the the person of interest is found in the database and that, if they are not located, effective alternate search strategies can be conducted and the researcher can more easily problem-solve in an attempt to improve their results. Searching willy-nilly without keeping […]

Noentje Lena Grass had been one of those immigrant ancestors I could never find on a manifest. Virtually all of my Ostfriesen ancestors have been found–and I have over twenty who immigrated between 1850 and 1883. I think I’ve located the Backemoor, Ostfriesland, native in the New York Passenger lists. Years ago when I searched, […]

This session focuses on the free aspects of DNA Painter at http://www.dnapainter.com. This is an updated presentation–we have given presentations on DNAPainter before and if you ordered that earlier presentation please note this one is similar to that one. We will discuss downloading matching data from DNA sites, painting your DNA matches, finding match data, […]

All transcriptions are not created equally. That’s one reason why it’s important to know from where the image being used was created. The card in our earlier post was from George Trautvetter’s Compiled Military Service Record (the record was created as a summary of Trautvetter’s service in Company H, 15th Infantry Volunteers Missouri Infantry and […]

In families where names are repeated repeatedly it can be easy to overlook one of the “repeatees.” One of the best ways to avoid that is to research as completely as possible. For a long time I was unaware of one of the Georges in my family. That can happen when there are a seemingly […]

This was posted 11 years ago. I don’t think we’re any closer today than we were then. In the old days of genealogy, we were told to fill out “research logs” where we tracked the sources we used, what names or families we looked for in these sources and the results of our search. Tracking […]

There are several genealogical data vendors who release databases as they are “in progress.” This is fine and good. However, it would be nice if those databases allowed us to somehow search the “new” material or data uploaded since a certain point in time. If that cannot be done, at least the ability to mark […]